TL;DR: Forget your EV or other certs. Just run “Let’s Encrypt”. It gets you a cert, it’s fresh, and it does not make any difference whatsoever. At least not any you or anyone else can check for, or cares for.

A hash function is a function that maps a large number of arbitrary data types onto a smaller number of contiguous integers.

This simple hash function maps strings of arbitrary length to integers. Some strings are mapped to the same integer: a hash value collision.

The base set here is a number of strings of arbitrary length, which is a theoretically open ended set size. The target is a bounded number of integer values. It is thus inevitable that two strings exist which are mapped to the same target number, a hash value collision.

Hash functions are useful in computer science, and you have been using them in everyday life, or at least seen them:

The German Tank Problem describes a method to statistically sample serial numbers of German WW2 tanks in order to estimate German War production capacity.

The Bloomberg Tesla Model 3 Tracker does use this method applied to vehicle identification numbers issued and observed to create upper and lower boundaries on the current weekly production rate for the Tesla Model 3.

CET introduces a shadow stack for return addresses only, and will fail your code into an exception if the normal stack return address and the shadow stack address disagree. Trying to touch and manipulate the shadow stack will also fail into an exception. That is, CET makes touching a return address on the stack toxic by having in effect separate argument and return address stacks, and your code explodes every time you try to do something funny with return addresses.

A good friend sent me a set of small testers with Whisky. A Laphroaig Cardeas 2016, Madeira Cask, a Starlight XXI Sierra Delta, and an Akashi.

The testers made it to me unharmed, wrapped like Sushi Rolls, but the caps unscrewed marginally through the transport vibration. Nothing much was lost, but I now know why the Whisky Calendar is sold with the caps in sealing wax.

Android 7 or 8, like their predecessors for some time now, offer you to make a backup. The config setup looks somewhat like above, and that’s seems to be quite good. It certainly looks like something you’d want.

Now, it’s 2018, and we all do have multple Android devices on the same account. So if you are using, say, a 5X, and it dies bootlooping, you’d might be tempted to revive an older device for a few days, until the replacement arrives.